The Landing Page Optimization Guide You Wish You’ve Always Had

What follows is a list of resources that can be applied specifically to landing page optimization, originally repurposed from ConversionXL and other great websites around the web.

We’ve organized everything to best simulate a visitor’s experience on a landing page from first click to final conversion.

To get the most out of this guide, please use each resource to focus on one area of your landing page experience at a time. Trust me, this will help you later on when you’re wondering what to test next.

I recommend you bookmark this page so you can come back to it when it’s time to create that next landing page.

Step Zero – Really Understand Your Target Market

Image credit: PixelPerfectDigital.com, used under CC license

Do This: Really get to know your market. Conduct surveys and interviews to understand your customer’s pain points. If you want extra credit, make a list of websites they’re exposed to, and build a picture of what their “typical” online experience is.

These questions help you uncover trends within your market and tell you things analytics alone can not. All of this is to inform a landing page design that follows your target market expectations which plays a huge role in reducing the amount of friction it takes for them to convert.

The biggest problem I see in landing page design and optimization is the page has no understanding of who the visitor is or their level of online exposure.

Screenshot taken 01/30/2014 of ask.metafilter.com

Surely, what’s “appeals” to a 54-year-old mother of 5 who goes online to check Facebook and Metafilter will be vastly different from a Google Glass wearing, 27-year-old power-user of social networks you haven’t even heard of yet.

Screenshot taken 01/1/2011 of the now defunct UseHipster.com

Landing page design isn’t a game where you flex your own aesthetic prowess.

It’s about connecting with the viewer and communicating value as quickly as possible. The more you accept that connection is on their terms, not yours, the better your pages will be.

Step One – Set Up Actionable Analytics

“Metrics are there to provide actionable insight. You need to look at a metric, ask “so what?” – and have an answer.” “Conversion rates for our top Adwords are way up. So what? We should increase our Adwords budget.”

Seems simple enough, and yet “Conversion” Analytics looks so intimidating that many of us skip this step so we can get straight to making money.

Stop it.

If you don’t have actionable analytics you’ll never get the full story on your landing page activity. You’ll end up throwing away money and guessing what to do next. Take the time. Learn to interpret your analytics data and make the most of it. Your marketing budget will thank you, I promise.

Step Two – Make Sure Your Ad’s Message Matches The Landing Page

Do This: Check the bounce rates on the landing pages where you’d like to generate more business. If they’re too high and conversions are too low, you may have a message match problem.

To know for sure, look at the ads pointing to the page that receive the highest click-through rates.

Does your page use similar language to what’s in the ad? Do the images in display ads re-appear on the landing page?

If you miss the mark on this, your landing pages are destined to fail.

Why?

Nine times out of 10, messages in the ad don’t correspond directly to what’s on the page.

Ad images and headlines that don’t correspond to landing page headlines and the page, generally speaking, are not what the user expected when they clicked the ad.

[vimeo 77432926 w=720 h=405]

They land on the page and feel ungrounded. Where’s the headline that grabbed their attention? At the very least, have you inserted the keyword they were searching for in a prominent place on the page?

No?

Lack of conversion is the result of lazy conversion optimization.

Instead of creating one page and throwing multiple, loosely targeted ads at it, create a handful of highly targeted landing pages that focus on tight-knit group of keywords. If your budget allows, experiment with a dynamic keyword insertion platform.

Step Four – Does Your Page Have Emotional Resonance?

Specifically, we’re looking for clues to let us know which emotional triggers will resonate the most for visitors to the page.

This goes hand in hand with first impressions, but it’s important we make a clear distinction between the two.

If first impressions start by ensuring everything is in a familiar location, emotional resonance is about enhancing these elements to create a mood, hook the visitor, and draw them deeper into the page.

Emotions like joy, pleasure, shock, horror, expectation, exclusivity, and surprise are just a smattering of what you could be designing for.

Only after you’ve picked the mood of the page should you look at things like colors, fonts, photography, and video.

Determine how to balance these elements to support the mood of the landing page – don’t just arbitrarily pick colors and fonts for the sake of eliciting a certain emotion. Blue doesn’t automatically equal trust, red isn’t always angry.

How each element plays with and supports each other is what really determines the overall mood of the page.

4. Show’s the end benefit of using it (Airbnb = Find a place to stay):

Screenshot taken 01/30/2014 of Airbnb.com

Now that your page is loaded and a first impression has been made, your visitor subconsciously decides if the page is worth reading.

If they haven’t clicked the back button, eye-tracking research shows the first thing they’ll be looking for – by default – is a dominate headline (your value proposition) At this point, your visitor’s only decision is “Does this site have what I need? “ or “Should I look somewhere else?” Because judgement was already passed a fraction of a second ago, all you’re doing now is reinforcing whether that initial judgement was right.

When your value proposition answers all of the questions above to help your visitor quickly decide if this page is really what they’re looking for – you stand a much better chance at keeping their interest throughout the rest of the page.

If your value proposition doesn’t answer those questions, you make the path to conversion far more difficult than it needs to be.

Remember in the last section I said a viewer’s natural instinct is to look for a dominate headline when a page loads? That instinct is superseded the moment you introduce real people or “humanoids” into the mix.

Image credit: The Conversation.com

I always strongly recommending working with a professional to create any visual elements, and stay away from stock photos if you’ve got the budget.

Nemo’s enthusiasm for Unbounce radiates as he walks you through the product’s core features. He also implies that Unbounce is partially responsible for the two to three times growth his team achieved – perfect for prospects who share Nemo’s “Growth” title and have to justify the monthly expense for their company.

If what you sell is difficult to understand, requires demonstration, or needs a little extra push so your target market “gets it”, video is an avenue worth exploring.

Also, always work with a professional when it comes to video. One great place to find great explainer video producers is Startup-Videos.com.

Notable Examples of Social Proof:Screenshot taken on 01/30/2014 of Muckrack.comScreenshot taken on 01/30/2014 of SproutSocial.com

Step Nine – Does The Copywriting Make You Want To Read More?

Do This: Get four to six peers together to conduct a peer review for the headlines and leads on the landing page.

Ask the question, “Does this make me want to read more?” and rate gut level responses on a scale of one (low) to four(high). If the average score is below 3.2, get specific suggestions on what to change.

Now that your visitor’s been on your landing page for half a second, they’ve had all the time they need to process the visuals and decide if you’re trustworthy.

At this point, the conscious mind kicks in and users really start consuming the copy on the landing page.

Clearly you want the copy to communicate benefits, but if you want your visitor to sink their teeth in, reinforce the tone established by the visual elements on the landing page. It will resonate with your visitor in a way they can taste.

Why? Because science shows using language that teases the senses fires up the sense centers in the brain.

Want to sell a running shoe?

Make the sweat sting their eyes. Get their heart thumping so loud it’s all they hear besides their feet hitting the ground and the quiet voice whispering “You’re almost there”.

Notable Examples:Screenshot taken on 01/30/2014 of TheResumator.comScreenshot taken on 01/30/2014 of Opera.com

Step 11 – Start A/B Testing

Image credit: ContentVerve.com

Do This: Create a document all of the alternative ideas you’ve had for copy, design, images etc. and form hypothesis as to why these may also work.

If this is your first time creating a landing page, you have two options:

Build one page to test challenge the existing, low converting page, run it, collect data, and form a hypothesis on how to improve the desired metric after the test is complete.

Build two equally strong pages targeting the same keyword, run them both, see which performs better, optimize the winning landing page accordingly.

In either scenario, all you’re really trying to do is collect enough data to validate your assumptions about your target market so you can formulate objectives, goals, and performance indicators for future tests.

The reason you want to document your ideas is so you have a record of what you’ve tried that works and what has increased. Even though many of your ideas will wind up being wrong and get thrown out, it’s much better than forgetting good ideas that could have earned you more.

Conclusion

So much of a visitor’s landing page experience happens in less than a second, so making the most of that time is crucial.

Think of your landing page as a way to tell the story of how your prospect’s life gets better, and use what you know about how the brain processes text and images to create a “hook” that gets them wanting more.

Landing page optimization is just a way to make the story better every time it’s told.